How to pick a niche and drive traffic to your website

Alright Yo'! `Yousef` is Backkk!

A quick start with definitions:

Niche. A "niche" is a term used to refer to a topic that is particularly good in some way. The idea of a niche is to be sucessful.

Traffic. In terms of the internet, traffic is the amount of people visting a site on the web. The more people that use it the more popular it is, and most likely easier for the web site owner to achieve his or her goals for that site.

Picking your niche:

Picking your niche is crucial when you begin to set up your site, I highly suggest that you pick it before you do anything else such as setting up a domain or choosing your hosting.

Your niche should be something your interested, or atleast moderately interested in. Generally, if you know the topic you'll do a lot better on building a website about it. Another key to the niche is that it must be in demand from the public (There has to be people who will want to view your site because it offers them something: products, information etc).

Also, if you plan on using your niche to earn you money you must make sure that you and it meet these requirements:

• Doesn't have alot of active competition (In other words, it's very unlikely you'll be able to build a sucessful Search Engine when Google and Yahoo are very dominant).
• You KNOW how you can earn revenue from your site (Affiliate Marketing & Ads are the most common ways).
• You can be persuasive in getting your viewers to buy the product your offering (If your affiliate marketing).

Niches can be broad or specified, but if your starting up a site for the first time, or planning on doing it solo it's recommended that you do the site on a more specific topic. For example, technology could be a niche you want to make your site on. You could then drop that down to consoles to decrease the wide spectrum of topics within technology. You could then take that down to a specific console, for example, xBox 360's.

Simply put: Section -> Topic within section -> Specified topic within topic.

Driving traffic to your niche:

Now you have chosen your niche you need to drive traffic to that niche. There is a variety of ways to do this, most involving search engines, or more specifically search engine ranks. The higher your site is listed within the search engine pages generally can determine the amount of traffic it will get. You can adapt your site to gain ranks within search engine pages, this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here is a image of the 1st Google Page for the search term "Sythe".



As you can see our Sythe :love: is listed at the top.

Now, implementing SEO on your website can be done in many ways, I recommend you do all to gain better rankings. I will list them below.

1. Choosing your keywords - This is probably the most important part of the SEO process. You can implement keywords easily, but choosing them can be a bit harder. A good tool to choose keywords can be found here.



Click on website content to find keywords relevant to the content on your website. If you don't have your site yet, use the default keyword generator option by entering in keywords related to your niche. Then click "get keyword ideas".



Notice the red highlighted parts of the image. The website used for the keyword search was www.runescape.com. The columns you want to look at are: keywords, advertiser competition and avg search volume. In the example above the term "multiplayer adventure games" has a fairly high advertiser competition but only 1,300 average searchs per month. Whereas if you look at the term "adventure game pc" you can see it has considerably lower advertiser competition but almost double searches! This would be a good choice of keywords to use in this case. Keep on playing around with different keywords until you find some good specific wants you want to use.

2. Creating a relevant domain - Simple and easy. Make sure you choose a domain relevant to the topic your basing your website on. Try to choose a .com if you can, they only cost around $6-10 a year off good domain name registars such as Go Daddy. Its a million times better then registering a free subdomain.

2. The META - Meta descriptions and keywords can be used in your website to gain popularity within the search engines. META key words can be implemented in this part of the HTML code:

Code:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword rich marketing sales-pitch meta description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
</HEAD>

3. ALT tags - There are also ways to optimize your sites images to include keywords which help search engines give them better placings.

Code:

<img src=”IMAGEURLHERE” alt=“KEYWORDS RELEVANT TO THE IMAGE” width=”75&#8243; height=”100&#8243;/>

DON'T shove loads of irrelevant keywords into the ALT tags!

4. Back Linking - Back Linking is a way placing links to your site on other websites. The more traffic that website gets the high it's Page Rank is. The higher the page rank of the site your link, the higher search engines will rank you. You can't backlink on any websites ofcourse, only sites that you have access to place your link on. Sites like these include: Free Forums, Directories etc. These are great places to start placing your links, but check with the sites rules/admin to make sure it's ok with them. Often they'll want you to place a link somewhere on your site back to them. Look Forums and Directories with a high page rank, this tool can help you determine the page ranking of the site.

In your link you can include keywords in what is also known as anchor text. However, this "anchor" text shouldn't be crammed full of key words, it should be like the site's title or description.

It should look some what like this:

Code:

<a href="url">anchor text with keywords</a>

Well thats pretty much a wrap for now, I may update this in the near future with any questions you may ask !

Links of relevance:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ - A great forum where you will find help with website traffic.